Year-end Carryforward of Unused Ship Time

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Year-end carryforward

Oct. 7, 1998

To: SIO Business Officers and PIs using SIO ships

From: Bob Knox

Subj: Year-end carryforward of "unused" ship time

SIO MSOs - please bring this to the attention of PIs in your units who are
users of UNOLS ships at SIO or elsewhere.

The Ship Scheduling Office occasionally has to answer inquiries from PIs or
business officers about whether ship time that is unused in a particular
year is or can be carried forward into the next year. The answer basically
is "no." The following portion of a recent letter from ONR explains their
policy. NSF (Ocean Sciences) policy is essentially identical.

"When a Principal Investigator funded by the Oceans, Atmosphere and Space
Science and Technology Department wants to schedule a cruise on any ship in
the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System, they must fill out
a UNOLS Form 831 Ship Time Request (on the web). Once the cruise is
scheduled on the requested ship, the Marine Operations Office of the
university that operates the ship will submit a proposal to the Research
Facilities Program. In the case of SIO the Ship Scheduling Office at SIO
will submit proposals for ship time and technician time for all ONR funded
cruises on the R/Vs Roger Revelle, Melville, New Horizon and Sproul.

If any Principal Investigator has not used ONR funded cruise days in any
given calendar year, these days will be converted to dollars and put as
carry-forward on the ship time proposal for the following calendar year to
ONR."

In other words, any unused dollars carry forward in a lump to offset the
overall cost of the institutional proposal for the new year, but there is
no carry-forward of the unused time or of any obligation of time toward a
particular PI or project. PIs cannot "bank" their unused time into the new
year.

A PI with good reasons to wish to reschedule unused time into a new year
(and there may well be such reasons) must first explain those reasons and
obtain approval for that rescheduling from the pertinent research program
manager, i.e., must essentially obtain a fresh approval of ship time from
the research program. The research program then interacts with the
corresponding ship operations program: Research Facilities Program in ONR;
Ship Operations Program in NSF. If that is done, and if the pertinent
operations program approves the rescheduling and conveys this approval to
the SIO Ship Scheduling Office, then the new ship time proposal will be
written to show both the carry-forward funds and the new schedule of the
approved time. Otherwise only unused funds, not any scheduled obligation
of time, will be carried forward.

I hope this clarifies a matter about which there has been some confusion.
If there are any questions, please consult the Ship Schedulers at
shipsked@ucsd.edu or x42840.

Bob Knox
Associate Director

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